The client filters available in serverclass.conf are DNS name, IP address, and platform (machine type). These filters allow the administrator to specify which forwarders belong to a server class and receive the apps and configurations from the deployment server. The Splunk server role is not a valid client filter in serverclass.conf, as it is not a property of the forwarder. For more information, see [Use forwarder management filters] in the Splunk documentation.

Comprehensive and Detailed Explanation (From Splunk Enterprise Documentation)Splunk’s multisite clustering documentation describes that search affinity is controlled by the site attribute in server.conf on the search head. Splunk explicitly states that assigning site=site0 on a search head removes site affinity, causing the search head to treat all sites as equal and search remotely as needed. The documentation describes site0 as the special value that disables local-site preference and forces the system to behave like a single-site cluster.

The customer wants each site’s search head to pull results only from its local site. This behavior works only if the search head’s site value matches the local site name (e.g., site1 or site2). By setting it to site0, all locality restrictions are removed, which prevents the desired reduction of network traffic.

The site search factor options (B and D) affect replication and searchable copy placement on indexers, not search head behavior. The number of indexers per site (C) also does not disable search affinity. Therefore only option A disables local-only searching.

The captain is the search head cluster component that is responsible for pushing knowledge bundles to search peers, replicating configuration changes to search head cluster members, and scheduling jobs across the search head cluster. The captain is elected from among the search head cluster members and performs these tasks in addition to serving search requests. The master is the indexer cluster component that is responsible for managing the replication and availability of data across the peer nodes. The deployer is the standalone instance that is responsible for distributing apps and other configurations to the search head cluster members. The deployment server is the instance that is responsible for distributing apps and other configurations to the deployment clients, such as forwarders

The correct configuration to meet the customer’s requirements is site_replication_factor = origin:1, site4:1, total:5. This means that each bucket will have one copy at the origin site, one copy at the disaster recovery site (site4), and three copies at any other sites. The total number of copies will be five, as required by the customer. The site_replication_factor determines how many copies of each bucket are stored across the sites in a multisite indexer cluster1. The site_search_factor determines how many copies of each bucket are searchable across the sites in a multisite indexer cluster2. Therefore, option B is the correct answer, and options A, C, and D are incorrect.

1: Configure the site replication factor 2: Configure the site search factor

 A Splunk job is a search process that is kicked off via a report, an alert, or a user action. A Splunk job is a child OS process manifested from the splunkd process, which is the main Splunk daemon. A Splunk job is subjected to some usage quota, such as memory, CPU, and disk space, which can be configured in the limits.conf file. A Splunk job is not a user-defined Splunk capability, as it is a core feature of the Splunk platform.

Adding more search peers and making sure forwarders distribute data evenly across all indexers will provide the most search performance improvement when the distributed deployment is approaching its capacity. Adding more search peers will increase the search concurrency and reduce the load on each indexer. Distributing data evenly across all indexers will ensure that the search workload is balanced and no indexer becomes a bottleneck. Replacing the indexer storage to SSD will improve the search performance, but it is a costly and time-consuming option. Adding more search heads will not improve the search performance if the indexers are the bottleneck. Rescheduling slow searches to run during an off-peak time will reduce the search contention, but it will not improve the search performance for each individual search. For more information, see [Scale your indexer cluster] and [Distribute data across your indexers] in the Splunk documentation.

The indexers may have different configurations than the heavy forwarders, which might cause the issue of inconsistently formatted events for a web sourcetype. The heavy forwarders perform parsing and indexing on the data before sending it to the indexers. If the indexers have different configurations than the heavy forwarders, such as different props.conf or transforms.conf settings, the data may be parsed or indexed differently on the indexers, resulting in inconsistent events. The search head configurations do not affect the event formatting, as the search head does not parse or index the data. The data inputs configurations on the forwarders do not affect the event formatting, as the data inputs only determine what data to collect and how to monitor it. The forwarder version does not affect the event formatting, as long as the forwarder is compatible with the indexer. For more information, see [Heavy forwarder versus indexer] and [Configure event processing] in the Splunk documentation.